Since the phonic abilities of high school shorthand teachers and students affect the students' mastery of dictation and transcription, a study was conducted (1) to develop a dictation/transcription learning cycle depicting the phoneme/grapheme correspondence in the two processes; (2) to determine the phonetic patterns of correspondence of the 5,170 most used business words in the two processes; and (3) to identify and analyze the phonic abilities of the teachers and students. The California Phonics Survey was administered to 341 shorthand students and twelve teachers in eleven Pittsburgh schools to ascertain the individual's ability to associate relationships between spoken sounds and written symbols. Based on the results (eighty-five percent of the students and thirty-three percent of the teachers showed serious phonic deficiencies), the need for studies in the following three areas was found: to determine if phonically disabled shorthand testees would benefit from developmental or remedial phonics instruction; to discover which of the currently used shorthand systems has the most phonically regular base and would be the easiest to learn; and to gather evidence concerning the concept of configuration and its relationship to dictation speed and visual discrimination. Also, several recommendations were proposed, including that a more structured language arts approach be incorporated into shorthand teaching methods and a more analytical, scientific approach be used towards coursework. (ELG)